on the biggest night of her life.
‘There’s a good Chinese joint over on Estes. Lum Fong’s. Do you know it?’
No, but she would never forget it as long as she lived.
What did you do the night you lost your cherry?
Oh, I went to Lum Fong’s first and had some Chinese food with Ron Peterson.
Was it good?
Sure. But you know Chinese food. An hour later, I was sexy again.
They had reached his car, a maroon Reo convertible. Ron held the door open for Catherine, and she sat in the seat where all the other girls she envied had once sat. Ron was charming, handsome, a top athlete. And a sex maniac. It would make a good title for a movie. The Sex Maniac and the Virgin. Maybe she should have held out for a nicer restaurant like Henrici’s in the Loop and then Ron would have thought, This is the kind of girl I want to take home to Mother.
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ he said.
Oh, great! All right, so he wasn’t the most brilliant conversationalist in the world. But that wasn’t why she was here, was it? She looked up at him sweetly. ‘I was just thinking about you.’ She snuggled against him.
He grinned. ‘You really had me fooled, Cathy.’
‘I did?’
‘I always thought you were pretty standoffish – I mean, not interested in men.’
The word you’re fumbling for is lesbian, Catherine thought, but aloud she said, ‘I just like to pick my time and place.’
‘I’m glad you picked me.’
‘So am I.’ And she was. She really was. She could be certain that Ron was a good lover. He had been factory-tested and approved by every horny coed within a radius of a hundred and fifty miles. It would have been humiliating to have had her first sexual experience with someone as ignorant as she was. With Ron she was getting a master. After tonight she would not be calling herself Saint Catherine any longer. Instead she would probably be known as ‘Catherine the Great.’ And this time she would know what the ‘Great’ stood for. She would be fantastic in bed. The trick was not to panic. All the wonderful things she had read about in the little green books she used to keep hidden from her mother and father were about to happen to her. Her body was going to be an organ filled with exquisite music. Oh, she knew it would hurt the first time; it always did. But she would not let Ron know. She would move her behind around a lot because men hated for a woman to just lie there, motionless. And when Ron penetrated her, she would bite her lip to conceal the pain and cover it up with a sexy cry.
‘What?’
She turned to Ron, appalled, and realized she had cried aloud. ‘I – I didn’t say anything.’
‘You gave a kind of funny cry.’
‘Did I?’ She forced a little laugh.
‘You’re a million miles away.’
She analysed the line and decided it was bad. She must be more like Jean-Anne. Catherine put her hand on his arm and moved closer. ‘I’m right here,’ she said.
She tried to make her voice throaty, like Jean Arthur in Calamity Jane.
Ron looked down at her, confused, but the only thing he could read in her face was an eager warmth.
Lum Fong’s was a dreary-looking, run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurant located under the Elevated. All through dinner they could hear the rumble of the trains as they ran overhead rattling the dishes. The restaurant looked like a thousand other anonymous Chinese restaurants all over America, but Catherine carefully absorbed the details of the booth they were seated in, committing to memory the cheap, spotted wallpaper, the chipped china teapot, the soy-sauce stains on the table.
A little Chinese waiter came up to the table and asked if they wanted a drink. Catherine had tasted whiskey a few times in her life and hated it, but this was New Year’s Eve, the Fourth of July, the End of her Maidenhood. It was fitting to celebrate.
‘I’ll have an old-fashioned with a cherry in it.’ Cherry! Oh, God! It was a dead giveaway.
‘Scotch and soda,’ Ron said.
The waiter bowed himself away from the table. Catherine wondered if it were true that Oriental women were built slantwise.
‘I don’t know why we never became friends before,’ Ron was saying. ‘Everyone says you’re the brightest girl in the whole goddamned university.’
‘You know how people exaggerate.’
‘And you’re damned pretty.’
‘Thank you.’ She tried to make her voice sound like Katherine Hepburn in Alice Adams and looked meaningfully into his eyes. She was no longer Catherine Alexander. She was a sex machine. She was about to join Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Cleopatra. They were all going to be sisters under the foreskin.
The waiter brought the drink and she finished it in one quick nervous gulp. Ron watched her in surprise.
‘Easy,’ he warned. ‘That’s pretty potent stuff.’
‘I can handle it,’ Catherine assured him, confidently.
‘Another round,’ he told the waiter. Ron reached across the table and caressed her hand. ‘It’s funny. Everybody at school had you wrong.’
‘Wrong. No one at school’s had me.’
He stared at her. Careful, don’t be clever. Men preferred to bed girls who had excessively large mammary glands and gluteus maximus muscles and exceedingly small cerebrums.
‘I’ve had a – thing for you for a long time,’ she said, hurriedly.
‘You sure kept it a secret.’ Ron pulled out the note she had written and smoothed it out. ‘Try our Cashier,’ he read aloud, and laughed. ‘So far I like it better than the Banana Split.’ He ran his hands up and down Catherine’s arm and his touch sent tiny ripples down her spine, just like the books said it would. Perhaps after tonight she would write a manual on sex to instruct all the poor, dumb virgins who didn’t know what life was all about. After the second drink Catherine was beginning to feel sorry for them.
‘It’s a pity.’
‘What’s a pity?’
She had spoken aloud again. She decided to be bold. ‘I was feeling sorry for all the virgins in the world,’ she said.
Ron grinned at Catherine. ‘I’ll drink to that.’ He lifted his glass. She looked at him sitting across from her obviously enjoying her company. She had nothing to worry about. Everything was going beautifully. He asked if she would like another drink, but Catherine declined. She did not intend to be in an alcoholic stupor when she was deflowered. Deflowered? Did people still use words like deflowered? Anyway, she wanted to remember every moment, every sensation. Oh, my God! She wasn’t wearing anything! Would he? Surely a man as experienced as Ron Peterson would have something to put on, some protection so she wouldn’t get pregnant. What if he was expecting the same thing? What if he was thinking that a girl as experienced as Catherine Alexander would surely have some protection? Could she come right out and ask him? She decided that she would rather die first, right at the table. They could carry her body away and give her a ceremonial Chinese burial.
Ron ordered the dollar seventy-five six-course dinner, and Catherine pretended to eat it, but it might as well have been Chinese cardboard. She was beginning to get so tense she couldn’t taste anything. Her tongue was suddenly dry and the roof of her mouth felt strangely numb. What if she had just had a stroke? If she had sex right after a stroke, it would probably kill her. Perhaps she should warn Ron. It would hurt his reputation if they found a dead girl in his bed. Or maybe it would enhance it.
‘What’s